You’ve read the title.
You’ve seen the thumbnail.
You’ve inspected the element and combed through the metadata.
This episode is about moderates, centrists, independents, pragmatists, middle-grounders,
fence-straddlers, and the ungodly, unceremonious “electable politician.”
Today, we’re looking at everyone’s political neighbors in the middle of the street.
Let’s.
Get.
This.
Started!
Cue
the MLK!
Look, I already know what you’re going to say.
“JT, please describe to me in political science terms what a moderate is.”
Fine, but only because I want to.
And as a punishment for being so presumptuous, I’m starting with the difference between
the left and the right.
You already know the story of the two terms.
During the French revolution, those who wanted to “laissez les bons temps rouler” with
absolute monarchical power sat on the right of the Assembly, their version of The House,
and the no good radicals who wanted to try out terrifying and capricious parliamentary
monarchy, ooOoOoH, sat on the left.
This is a pretty specific issue to disagree about, so when people, i.e. academics with
too much free time, try to come up with meaningful differences between the left and the right
that hold true across most of global political history, you get very vague distinctions between
the two political families.
While today we associate the left and the right mostly with their stances on specific
economic issues or cultural debates, the most fundamental distinction that you can probably
make between the two is that the left seeks to change society into something new, and
the right seeks to preserve present society or to go back to something old.
In practice, that usually means the left seeks to undermine established hierarchies and distribute
power and wealth more equally and the right seeks to preserve hierarchy and order since
most existing societies are or were built around power being concentrated in very few
hands.
But obviously such a simple distinction will certainly make you mad, so be sure to comment
why and how I’ve actually gotten it completely wrong in the comment section.
I’d hate for this video to get more engagement.
Anyway, we’ve lost the plot a little here.
We’re not talking about either of these groups, we’re talking about the illuminated
minds who can look past the squabbling of these dirty extremes: moderates.
The people who reject petty ideological battles, and at the end of the day, just know better
than you and I.
Just listen to how terrible the extremes are in this No Labels video on the Biden infrastructure
bill:
Cool!
Fine, let’s be a little bit more charitable and actually understand what’s going on
here.
Centrists and moderates in America (the two terms are pretty much interchangeable) are
people and politicians who are not entirely satisfied with the political programs of either
major political party.
Unlike people who reject both parties from the opposite ends of the spectrum, however,
moderates are most comfortable in the bi-partisan middle.
They usually like saying things like “We’re neither left nor right.”
We’ll get to that sentence in a minute, but first, we might like to understand centrists
a little better.
If we are to assume the definition of left and right as historically transcendent terms
about the stance one has towards present society and values like egalitarianism, being a centrist
doesn’t really make sense.
Over time, movements that start out on the left like liberalism, republicanism, or even
parliamentary monarchy, become solidly right wing movements without ever changing their
ideology because they replace the old right and become contested by the new, more radical
left.
In such a position, centrism becomes nothing more than a conservative ideology.
Its prime directive is resistance to change and as a result, it’s not “neither left
nor right,” it’s just right-wing.
It might have been on the left in yesterday’s society, but now that the goals of the old
left are the established order and have become the new conservative right, preserving present
society with only incremental and moderate reform (which is what centrists believe in)
becomes a profoundly conservative worldview.
And it makes sense that this is where moderacy settles, because it has to compromise between
two completely opposing ideas: changing society in a new way, or keeping it the same.
Think about classic centrist statements like “we need a mix of socialism and capitalism,”
an idea that makes absolutely zero sense when you know the two ideologies and that their
base disagreement about the ownership of the means of production makes them fundamentally
incompatible.
Okay, this all might seem a little confusing.
Let’s get away from the theory of it for a second and look at something concrete like
the Biden brand
of centrism.
This speech is Biden’s “Freebird.”
Biden, like pretty much every centrist, is a big fan of compromise.
Reaching across the aisle to get past political gridlock is the doctrine of American centrism,
and when you hear him talk about it you can kind of get sucked into the idea that this
form of compromise is what makes politics, and therefore society, progress.
It appeals to our vision of the democratic ideal: a society in which everyone gathers
around the table to discuss an issue and then comes to a mutual decision that compromises
on the various interests represented by the assembly.
And, if after all, nobody compromises we might very well not get anywhere.
In American politics, this is anything but democratic, though, and far from leading to
the progress we’re promised, we get a government that stagnates or actively pursues regressive,
reactionary politics.
Take immigration.
For over a year, we heard just about every democrat call out the very real, far-right
policies enacted by the Trump admin at the Mexican border.
One of these was the invocation of Title 42, a policy choice that might as well be called
“oh, it really is just that easy.”
At the start of the pandemic, the Trump administration used the pretext of national health and COVID-19
to close the southern border pretty much completely.
Nobody comes in, and a whole lot of people go out.
It was a brilliant success for conservatives and reactionaries, and a massive step back
in immigration law.
And to this day, Title 42 still stands.
No, sorry, that makes it seem like people aren’t paying attention to it.
The Biden administration is defending it tooth and nail in the courts.
True to the spirit of compromise, Biden changed the application of the rule so that it would
no longer apply to unaccompanied minors, but on the back end has used it to expel around
700,000 migrants, more than the Trump administration ever achieved with its “paltry” 450,000.
Simultaneously, Biden has also continued the construction of the border wall, has led the
infamous “Do Not Come” campaign, and left untouched migrant detention facilities (you’ll
remember them as “concentration camps” during the Trump presidency).
It’s not that Biden has done nothing for progressive immigration politics, he’s reinstated
DACA and done work to reunite separated families, but the majority of his platform has been
tweaking Trump-era policies in the spirit of compromise rather than reversing them entirely
and treating them like the indefensible, right wing policies that they are.
Centrism isn’t incremental progress in these circumstances.
Malcolm X said it best:
When reactionary and far-right politics are so dominant in a society as America and so
regularly find their way to institutions of power (or are baked right in from the start),
the centrist stance of compromise and incremental retroactive change allows for politics to
jump to the right without ever really coming back.
How many politicians today pretend like there’s a reasonable compromise between the “we
need healthcare” left and the “we need an ethno-state” right?
Title 42 still stands because the myopic compromise of moderate ideology fails to take into account
longer political trends.
There are of course some exceptions to the rightward shift of American politics, but
the attachment to moderation at all costs makes any left-wing legislation a blip in
what is otherwise a sea of reactionary bravado.
But most centrists don’t like this and that’s not how they think about themselves.
They don’t like the idea that they are just a mushy average of the left and the right
or a simple tool of conservative politics.
Instead, moderates describe their stance something like this: “I don’t care whether something
comes from the left or the right, I just look at the idea and judge it on its own merit.”
Here the tricky centrist thinks he’s gotten us.
We can’t possibly disagree with the idea of sensibly considering multiple options and
forming an opinion based on rational cost and benefit analyses!
And he’s right, but at the end of the day, centrism falls right back into the same place
whether it sees its role as averaging out the left and the right or picking and choosing
from each side.
And that’s because the Overton window is so small and so skewed in America.
The choices centrists make are limited by the acceptable politics they are contextualized
in, and the American political spectrum being so stunted towards the right with only figures
like Bernie Sanders and his social-democratic politics even approaching the left, means
that centrism will by default fall into the conservative, stagnatory, or even regressive
role.
There just aren’t that many options to choose from, and they’re mostly on the same side
anyway.
Even if the centrist voter is a careful and considerate pragmatist, who doesn’t blindly
follow the party line and thinks entirely for themselves on every topic and political
debate, the inevitable fact that they will be picking and choosing policies from the
fascistic Trumpism in the Republican party and the neoliberal capitalism of the Democrats,
to the extent they can even be differentiated at times, means they’ll never actually consider
the full range of political debate because the left isn’t prominently represented.
The result is the center conserves far more than it progresses, and when it chooses to
conserve something built by the right, it actively participates in regressive, reactionary
politics.
There’s also the issue that politicians who call themselves the center aren’t really
doing so in good faith.
While they may represent the center between elected officials, the actual center of the
American people is far more to the left on many key issues than the center of the American
political class.
Just look at this clip featuring celebrity
centrist Joe Lieberman
And here we get back to that MLK quote.
It’s absurd to think that any moderate democrat or any republican would ever agree to any
of these policies that have overwhelming support among Americans if the only difference was
that they were just sat down and talked to as opposed to having things “pushed through.”
There is no way that moderate democrats like Manchin, Sinema, or Biden are going to be
convinced by good argumentation presented politely when that is contending with the
massive sums of money changing hands to make sure they remain spoilers.
MLK made it very clear.
The moderate’s role in politics is to slow things down to a trickle.
Justice gets delayed further and further, never actually realized despite decades of
promises, allowing for millions of people to continue suffering injustice and hundreds
of thousands more to be brought into the fold.
It’s trite, but justice delayed is justice denied.
The issue we’re going to have to figure out is how we do anything about this.
In every election, moderates are going to dominate the field because they will continuously
be presented as more sensible, measured, and pragmatic than their opponents.
They have done the careful electoral calculation and know that between the people who will
inevitably vote for them and the people who will never vote for them regardless of what
they do, the only way to win is to present themselves to the colossal group of American
moderates who won’t bother to go any further than see who gets closest to being the exact
average of the Dems and the Republicans.
We know Americans want more from their politicians.
We know that, for the greatest number of them, those things are further to the left than
anything the government has provided in decades.
That is a much bigger issue for our democracy than “polarization.”
Democracy is slow by nature and there are times where that can be a good thing.
But when democracy is slowed down artificially like this, just for the sake of slowing it
down and not letting things change for the better, when politicians ignore what people
not only demand but desperately need, it no longer resembles democracy nor its ideals.
If you’re hearing an appeal to authoritarianism in these statements, you’re not understanding
what I’m saying.
We need far greater democracy than what we have today, real democracy, democracy for
the majority, and continuing to venerate moderates in this country won’t bring us any closer
to getting it.